The Science of Thinking — Conformity
You might have an opinion that mechanical keyboards are better for typing than the Laptop keyboards or the dark themed IDEs are better for your eyes than the light themed one. But I use Laptop keyboards and light themed IDEs for coding. In-fact I do not even listen to K-POP or do not even watch pop culture hit American shows, even if people remind to do so every alternate day.
So today we are gonna talk about the conformity bias, which is the tendency of people to behave like those around them rather than using their own personal judgment. The most famous experiment proving conformity bias is the Asch Conformity Experiment. In the experiment a group of people were shown 4 lines out of which two were of same height and they were to identify the two lines. The catch was in a trial only one was the real participants and the other participants were actors who were put there to say the wrong answer. The findings were that the real participants tends to go with the popular mandate and chose the wrong answer even when the difference was clearly visible.
Like everything other thing conformity also has levels namely Compliance, Identification and Internalization. In compliance the people change their public behavior (the way they act) but not their personal beliefs. In Identification the people their public behavior and private belief, but only while they are in the presence of group they are identifying with. Internalization is the deepest level of conformity. Here a person changes both their public behavior (the way they act) and their private beliefs. This is usually a long-term change and often the result of informational social influence.
Also there are two types of influences, Informative and Normative. Informational influence is conformity under acceptance of evidence about reality which has been provided by others, when people themselves lack information about it. This is why we believe to what the expert says. Normative Influence is conformity based on one’s desire to fulfill others’ expectations and gain acceptance, basically it happens because we want to fit in the common narrative. This is the reason people watch friends, GOT , read self-help because they don’t want to feel left out.
Now you might be thinking what is the great deal about it. An important study of the interrogations of 210 members of the Reserve Police Battalion 101 (responsible for the killing of 38,000 Jews and the deportation of 45,000 others) revealed that although the individual members of the group did not have orders to kill, almost 90 percent committed murders by the end of the Holocaust. Furthermore, their actions could not be attributed to psychopathology or a previous history of violence. In fact, records indicate that 80 percent to 90 percent of the men were initially horrified and disgusted by what they were doing. However, the desire not to face isolation and ostracism or not to be perceived as “weak” motivated many of them to perpetrate truly horrific acts of violence and murder. The ordinary desire to get along with their comrades, not to stick out, and to avoid social rejection appears to have been a primary motivating force for many of them.
The less evil effect of conformity is the whole Influencer marketing thing or even marketing in general. People want to become like the influencers they are seeing all the time on the social media, so they end up buying what they are promoting. You might also have book’s cover saying two million copies sold, or 9 out of 10 dentist recommend something, this is just to make your conform with the group. The marketers just want to hook into the conformity bias of people and tell them, everybody is doing this so you must also do it.
So coming back to the original things, so for a long period of times I used to force myself on dark themed IDEs and I tried watching watching friends to look cool, but honestly speaking the show is so dumb that I cannot watch a single episode of it. But over the period of time I have realized that my self-confidence comes from my success and not from conforming to other people. In-fact if you will read about Chromatic theory you will find out black text on white background is easer for the eyes to recognize than white text on black background. The only place when dark themed IDEs work when the room is dark, because then the eyes are less strained if the screen is also dark.
So I feel when you are aware of the conformity bias and you ask yourself if you are taking some decision because you want to fit in the pop culture or you really want to take those decision, then you can actually better decision for yourself.
